Finishing up in the studio

“Upcoming Storm”. Watercolor collage 10×8″ in white mat to 12×10″. $80

Here’s the watercolor collage I started 9 days ago at Red Brick Gallery.  I had put down all the pieces, just hadn’t put on a foreground.  As with many of these creations, it really doesn’t come together until that stage.  Many people commented when I was at Red Brick that they like the three-dimensionality, the depth, that the foreground gives to the background.

The way that the paintings finally start to exist in these very last stages reminds me of the paintings that Rolf Harris did during a children’s show I used to watch.  I had to go to wikipedia to remind myself that it was called ‘The Rolf Harris Show’.  Towards the end of the show, he would do a huge painting on a roll of paper about 10’x10′ hanging on the wall, and from big brushes with pots of house paint, set in a line at the bottom of the paper.  The paintings always consisted of a number of seemingly meaningless marks of different colors (at least I assumed they were color, we only had a black and white tv) which built up over the course of about five minutes.  It was only in the last 30 seconds or so of the painting that it became apparent what it was.

In my collage, it’s not until I look at again a week later I see that there are little blonde reeds growing underneath my signature, that the mountains have more layers than I was aiming for and that the reds in the skies on the left reflect more realistically in the water than I had thought they would.